Half an Hour: The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On - The Diigo Meta page

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  • They will be able to be in constant audio and video contact with family and friends, meaning that families and groups will never really be separated unless one of them chooses to be.
• 31 Oct 11
  

  Michelle Krill

  "The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning. While on the one hand, new technology allows schools and instructors to offer learning in new ways, educators nonetheless continue to face limitations imposed by technology, and sometimes the lack of technology. While access to the internet has increased greatly over the last decade, some schools continue to experience bandwidth shortages and most schools do not have enough computers for every student. Yet, this is changing, and the pace of this change will continue to accelerate."

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  From 1998 to 2008. The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning

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  • While technology changes rapidly, people do not. People want to use tools that look and feel like tools they’ve always used, and will tend to adopt tools only if they see a clear benefit either in productivity or in savings. (Starr, 2003)
  • Traditionally, people have been seen to learn either as individuals or in groups. This characterization of organization is not unique to education; it is very common to talk of (say) the needs of the individual versus the needs of the state. This characterization, however, glosses over the possibility that there may be more or less cohesive ways of organizing people, thus allowing for a middle point between the individual and the group: the network.
  • Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.
  • In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser.
  • The personal learning environment, however, is not based on the principle of access to resources. It should more accurately be viewed as a mechanism to interact with multiple services. (Milligan, 2006) The personal learning environment is more of a conferencing tool than it is a content tool. The focus of a personal learning environment is more on creation and communication than it is consumption and completion. It is best to think of the interfaces facilitated by a personal learning environment as ways to create and manipulate content, as applications rather than resources.

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• 13 Aug 11
  

  Gary Brown

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  wlampner

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  • The ‘personal learning environment’ (PLE) is a collection of concepts intended to express this idea. (Liber, 2006) The PLE is no
  • The process, simply, is that learners will be presented with learning resources according to their interests, aptitudes, educational levels, and other factors (including employer factor and social factors) while they are in the process of working at their job, engaging in a hobby, or playing a game.
  • The personal learning environment, however, is not based on the principle of access to resources
  • mechanism to interact with multiple services
  • more on creation and communication than it is consumption and completion
  • products of our conversations are as concrete as test scores and grades.
  • Educational institutions will need more and more to think of themselves as part of a larger system, and as their offerings as entities that will become a part of, and interact with, the larger environment.
  • knowledge is contained, not merely in the bits of information transmitted to and fro as content and creations, but in the way these contents, and the people that create them, link togethe
  • he purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment – a game, a community, a profession – through the provision of the materials that will assist him or her to, in a sense, see the world in the same way as an accomplished expert; and this is accomplished not merely by presenting learning materials to the learner, but by facilitating the engagement of the learner in conversations with members of that community of experts.
  • ducational institutions will need to see themselves as providers of learning resources (and not merely learning objects). These resources will be online services that connect students with: learning content; games, simulations, and other activities; ad hoc communities of learners; and experts and other practitioners.
  • multimedia content consumption, editing and authoring systems designed to facilitate a student’s ability to perceive and perform as modeled by experts in a community of practice.
  • will need to be able to learn about the environment they are being offered in, be able to learn about the student, and to get this information not just locally but from wherever it may be on the internet.
  • ill not be inert content objects
  • hey may, therefore, be fully-fledged web services, but they are just as likely to be lightweight applications depending on other simple services to do much of this work for them.
    
  • evolve over time into a mature system of open content distribution, facilitated through open access mandates, repository and other server software, and content and interaction standards.
  • What It Isn’t
  • daptive systems
  • artificial intelligences that test a student’s competence, formulate customized lesson plans based on those pre-tests, and then measure a student’s performance
  • results will not constitute, by themselves, ‘evidence’ of learning.
  • Students will demand that there be a human element to evaluation,
  • heir own performance is varied and complex, and may not be measured accurately by a machine
  • employers and others will require a human element, because they will understand that humans devise endless schemes to ‘game’ or otherwise trick automated systems.
  • what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities
  • hough there will continue to be ‘degrees’, these will be based on a mechanism of evaluation and recognition, rather than a lockstep marching through a prepared curriculum
  • ducational institutions will not have a monopoly on such evaluations
  • more prestigious ones will recognize the value of aggregating and assessing evaluations from other sources
  • Earning a degree will, in such a world, resemble less a series of tests and hurdles, and will come to resemble more a process of making a name for oneself in a community.
  • Time Independence
  • o academic or technological reason to stick to such a schedule
  • s though the ‘hour’ were a unit of knowledge or learn
  • time is ceasing to be an objective standard of learning.
  • Pacing continues to be important, even in instances of self-pacing
  • Being free to set one’s own schedule does not mean setting no schedule at all.
  • meshing of schedules.
  • events and syndicated contents to circulate within the same network, creating an association between time and content that is dynamic, fluid, and distributed
  • llow them to participate, on impulse, in learning activities
  • nline learning might foster independence of place has been missing in much of the discussion of the field
  • Students will be freed from the classroom, and freed from the stationary desktop comput
  • ducators will once again need to get past the idea that learning is something (usually content) that is delivered to people
  • designers realize that, instead of delivering content to the student, they can require the student to go out and get it – or even better, to go out and create it. Once we understand that learning can and should occur outside the classroom, it will become commonplace to see students engaged in learning activities throughout the community.
  • place independence means that real learning will occur in real environments, with the contributions of the students not being some artifice designed strictly for practice, but an actual contribution to the business or enterprise in question.
  • tudents ‘working at school’.
  • Independence of online place will be as important to the future of online learning as will be independence of physical pla
  • earning evolves slowly from a classroom-based and deliver-based type of instruction, and toward wide-ranging learning activities that are largely selected and managed by the students themselves, the dedication of space in schools to classroom instruction will be reduce
  • blended’ aspect of blended learning will come increasingly to reflect the in-person activities people undertake in their own workplaces or communities.
  • toward the development and deployment of learning facilities in traditional working environments.
  • usually learn what we learn from other people.
  • nowledge and skills are demonstrated, criticized, or merged.
  • splays of identity, which manifest themselves in the jargon people use, the clothes they wear, and the remarks they make
  • rocess of learning is a process of becoming
  • future where learning will actually occur is that they will be communities in which learners can immerse themselves and grow into something new
  • places where they can create and where they can project
  • life itself that is the main learning event
  • nline component of a person’s learning environment will tend to me more distributed, based on communications and connections of a cognitive nature.
  • offline component of a person’s learning environment will tend to be more localized and immediate
  • host’ in this framework
  • agencies that would have the most interest in fostering learning
  • provider typically operates at a remote location, and might be a national government, university or institution, telecom company, software company or publisher. These agencies provide services, but act based on interests of their own
  • ncreasing activity on the ‘provider’ side of the equation, as institutions and agencies set up repositories and online services
  • it’s more difficult
  • Significantly less work is being done at the ‘host’ level
  • local agencies will become more pro-active, seeking out and supporting more interactive and more engaging forms of learning.
  • Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a ‘learning community’ – save, perhaps, the strained and artificial creations of educational institutions that try to cram classes into collectives, creating personal relationships where none naturally exist.
  • communities are grown rather than constructed, and that (therefore) they are owned (and managed) by their members rather than by some external agency
  • monopoly on degree-granting status largely remains in the hands of traditional institutions. But nobody can expect it to remain there
  • alue of a community, however, and especially of a learning community, comes from the diversity in the community
  • probably inevitable that the domains of ‘learning’ and ‘testing’ will separate
  • may even be thought of as quaint that those responsible for the fostering of learning were also those responsible for evaluating whether or not learning actually happened.
  • much a matter of drawing on the differences as it is a matter of underlining the similarities.
  • model of assigning testing to independent testing agencies is already the norm in some industries.
  • raditional learning there is slow acceptance that people may be tested without first having been taught
  • some way able to demonstrate their ability – through a portfolio system, for example, are able to circumvent the need for testing altogether.
  • process of community enabling
  • greater demand for a formalized system of recognition
  • institution become more willing (after much arm-twisting) to recognize educational achievements from a wide range of providers, including testing agencies, as constituting part, or even all, of the degree.
  • representation of education as a service will become more pronounced.
  • Economic pressures will prevail.
  • online learning offers an inexpensive alternative – but only if it is deployed using less labour-intensive practices
  • replicating the offline experience online does not save money;
  • resources provided by educators, and by assisting each other through collaborative networks
  • be based on the idea that learners are able to provide for their own learning
  • delivery of learning is separated from testing and certification, there will be a proliferation of learning agencies (and, potentially, a proliferation of testing agencies)
  • system of reputation management that is integrated into the search process
  • software will draw information from a wide range of other services, including information about the institution that produced the resource.
  • Personalization is at the core of recommender systems; what counts as ‘the right resource’ varies from person to person, from time to time.
  • testing agencies will also acquire a reputation over time, this based largely on assessments of people it has tested
  • rely on a number of different testing agencies in order to mitigate the risk of being certified by a poorly ranked agency
  • person’s standing in a community can be recognized by members of that community, and is acquired through months and years of participation in the work of that community
  • people presenting certification without having acquired a reputation for work in the community will be viewed with suspicion
  • Reputation systems based on data that can’t be replicated or imitated will acquire the most trust, and these will most likely be based on verifiable identity and interactions within social networks.
  • modularity works very well in some context
  • not all parts fit all other parts
  • first, distributed design, which would allow courses to be made up of components located all over the internet;
  • second, educational object repositories
  • Material will be sourced externally
  • local copies are created, this will be done automatically.
  • search federation – a single search will be executed simultaneously across a number of different libraries all at once
  • attention metadata, is now being merged with bibliographic metadata.
  • heir own internally created contextual metadata (such as link information) to organize search results.
  • connected, distributed, web
  • odularity, as seen from this perspective, takes the idea of a learning object communicating with a single LMS, to form a single course, and multiplies it, allowing a single learning resource to communicate with multiple entities, to form parts of multiple courses, all at once.
  • It a library, referred to when wanted, or a work in the library, that the learner is currently authoring.
  • management of re-use would be placed directly into the learner’s hands
  • autonomous objects;
  • licenses prohibiting the enclosure of such work in proprietary media
  • commercial presence will be seen most of all through the provision of services.
  • two major criteria
  • financial return in the marketplace
  • cannot be something that can be digitally duplicated,
  • cannot be something that the users of that good or service could easily produce for themselves
  • value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity
  • scarcity of credentialing agencies, a
  • scarcity of seats in classrooms,
  • educational publications
  • scarcities will disappear as governments prefer to fund education directly, and at cost
  • some educational content will also find a commercial niche
  • much larger markets to be had when they help people create their own content.
  • helping them, in other words, save time and money – will provide the best opportunities
  • Course content creation kits instead of courses.
  • ystems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.
  • instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each othe
  • designers will pay more attention to the concept of the platform
  • platform is a software environment in which third party applications may be loaded and run.
  • an instructional management system is the backbone motherboard into which all educational components are plugged
  • who manages the platform?
  • platforms will have to help people do the sorts of things they want to do
  • if the platform becomes an advertising vehicle or an instrument of censorship, it will be eschewed – eventually – in favour of more useful technologies.
  • Tracking and reporting are the major functions required
  • The recognition of learning, whether by institutional certification, third-part testing, or community reputation, is to a significant degree a matter of reporting activities and achievement.
  • need to be, to a certain extent, voluntary
  • user’s ability to assume different identities for different tasks.
  • usage metadata – also called attention metadata
  • metadata will be available for harvesting
  • employed by aggregators in order to create a profile of the resource
  • different people will see different profiles of the same resource
  • depending on what they think is important.
  • rather that their environments will be more or less digitally porous depending on time and circumstances.
    
  • only way forward will be to enable people to select what they want, rather than to force them to block what they don’t want
  • create a content aggregation network composed of trusted suppliers, friends, and friends of friend
  • popularity of social networks
  • riven by a desire to shut out unwanted people and content
  • exclusive enclaves
  • nternet will resemble less a broadcast medium and more a person-to-person communications medium
  • Adaptive filters will all people to monitor a wide community
  • Other flags set by trustworthy people will propel content through these filters, creating, in effect, a notification network
  • Content providers, such as governments, educators and news agencies, will be able to act as inputs into the communications networks
  • reach people through intermediaries, who filter, fact-check, and interpret these communications
  • model of learning that puts much of the organization into the hand of students – such as is the case with the Massive Open Online Course
  • much more cost-efficient.
  • automation allows is
  • Automation does not mean the end of teaching careers
  • deep personalization’ of learning
  • more easily create and present
  • more easily form groups and collaborat
  • o more easily give tests and take surveys
  • frees instructors to perform tasks that have been traditionally more difficult and time consuming – to relate to students on a personal basis, to offer coaching and moral support, to learn about and analyze a student’s inclinations and understandings.
  • different educational professionals will fulfill different roles
  • testing and evaluation specialists,
  • content creators and presenters
  • coaches and advocates,
  • tools will become more specialized
  • practice will become more professional.
  • save on transportation costs
  • construction costs will decline
  • more and more educational resources are digitized, the enormous sums of money spent on things like text books and even wall maps will be reduced to a trick
  • distribution of entire libraries of digital content on keychains or necklaces.
  • savings in staff costs per student will be realized when the traditional teacher-and-class model is abandoned.
  • cost of learning texts will diminish to near zero. Transportation costs will be eliminated.
  • able to begin working and earning early in their educational career, resulting in a longer period of productivity, and more wealth, opportunities and choices later in life.
  • ecessary for institutions to offer their courses online - and sooner, rather than later - because the costs of not doing so are too great.
  • pressures to take advantage of the potential savings offered by technology, which were not so great before, are now mounting.
  • etermined population of ambitious, talented and self-sufficient students can educate themselves, creating their own community, their own professions, their own future.
  • mergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.

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• 26 Jul 11
  

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  • As mentioned above (in the section on personal learning environments) the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.
• 04 Nov 10
  

  Anna-Marie Robertson

  Comparison of predictions from 10 years ago concerning technology to today and beyond.

  technology predictions future trends e-learning Downes

• 26 Oct 10
  

  Iolanda Garcia

  education web2.0 e-learning Downes connectivism digital_literacy PLE TEL

• 22 Aug 10
  

  Darren Kuropatwa

  In the summer of 1998 ... I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) ... I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.
  
  In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarka

  FutureOfLearning

• 06 Aug 10
  

  Ramiro Aduviri Velasco

  downes

• 

  juan domingo farnos

  Half an Hour: The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On http://bit.ly/9DlL0s (Stefen Downws)

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• 15 Jun 10
  

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• 03 Feb 10
  

  lindaneffster

  e-learning

  • a decreasing emphasis on this formal style of learning, and an increasing emphasis on what has come to be called informal learning. (Chivers, 2006) In the case of informal learning, students are not constrained by the limits of the classroom model. They can set their own curriculum and proceed at their own pace. (Moore, 1986) Learning can thus be based on a student’s individual needs, rather than as predefined in a formal class, and based on a student’s schedule, rather than that set by the institution.
  • Traditionally, people have been seen to learn either as individuals or in groups. This characterization of organization is not unique to education; it is very common to talk of (say) the needs of the individual versus the needs of the state. This characterization, however, glosses over the possibility that there may be more or less cohesive ways of organizing people, thus allowing for a middle point between the individual and the group: the network.
  • Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.
  • Traditional learning composed of classes and cohorts operates more as a group than as a network. (Davis, 1993) Students pursue the same objectives employing the same methodologies. This is especially evident in corporate learning, where they are expected to share the same vision and to be pursuing the same outcomes. Learning in such classes is frequently collaborative, as students work in small groups to produce a common project or outcome. (Mohn & Nault, 2004) Interaction is structured and led by an instructor. Classes are closed; there is a clear barrier between members and non-members.
    
    In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser. People pursue their own objectives in their own way, while at the same time initiating and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with others pursuing similar objectives. Learning and discussion is not structured, but rather, is determined by the needs and interests of the participants. There is no leader; each person participates as they deem appropriate. There are no boundaries; people drift into and out of the conversation as their knowledge and interests change.
    
  • the trend is shifting away from courses and toward topics.
  • As such, students are able to select their own track or achievement path through a competence domain, as informed by their own interests, employer needs, or in the case of younger students, parental guidance.
  • many valuable skills and aptitudes – art appreciation, for example – are not identifiable as an outcome.

    • Instructional design methodologies rely on outcomes based learning to the detriment of the students -- not all skills can be measured through an outcomes based process.
    Add Sticky Note
  • personal learning environment’ (PLE) is a collection of concepts intended to express this idea. (Liber, 2006)

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• 16 Dec 09
  

  Irmeli Aro

  "We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is
  practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal
  curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community
  facilitators, online instructors and experts around

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• 19 Nov 09
  

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  El Futuro de la Enseñanza en línea: diez años después

  Historia

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  Ramon Aragon

  El Futuro de la Enseñanza en línea: diez años después

  Historia

• 04 Sep 09
  

  jlearn 2.0

  In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.
  
  In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.

  learning education future elearning trends

• 24 Aug 09
  

  Drew McAllister

  elearning opened downes future

  • As such, educators over the years have attempted to keep the use of tools to a minimum, and as invisible as possible, and to focus on the teaching.

    • so, part of the adoption process may be that the introduction of a tool must be preceded by a discussion of pedagogy and what the tool can bring to that discussion
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• 17 Apr 09
  

  Diego Leal
  • To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet.
  • To become educated in a discipline is to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline
  • In both of these we are seeing aspects of the same phenomenon. To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
  • On the other hand, online learning offers an inexpensive alternative – but only if it is deployed using less labour-intensive practices. Simply replicating the offline experience online does not save money; rather, we see reports that it becomes more expensive. Online learning, if it is to offer economic advantage, must be based on the idea that learners are able to provide for their own learning, using both resources provided by educators, and by assisting each other through collaborative networks.
  • Consequently, the bookmark as public performance and record becomes one of its primary functions.
  • A determined population of ambitious, talented and self-sufficient students can educate themselves, creating their own community, their own professions, their own future. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes, if we would only look.
  • This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.

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  Interesante ensayo sobre las perspectivas del elearning

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  Martin Aa

  In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
  
  In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.

  web2.0 kaffeikampala teknologi e-læring framtida

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  Carlos Castaño

  elearning2.0 investigacion tendencias

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  monica aresta

  Downes, 2008

  education e-learning online web2.0 learning research technology

  • It is worth noting that theorists of both professional and social networks speak of one’s interactions within the community as a process of building, or creating, one’s own identity.
    Wenger, for example, writes, “Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations. Consider the annual computer drop at a semiconductor company that designs both analog and digital circuits. The computer drop became a ritual by which the analog community asserted its identity. Once a year, their hero would climb the highest building on the company's campus and drop a computer, to the great satisfaction of his peers in the analog gang. The corporate world is full of these displays of identity, which manifest themselves in the jargon people use, the clothes they wear, and the remarks they make.” (Wenger, 1998)
    
    And meanwhile, danah boyd, studying the social community, writes, “The dynamics of identity production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public displays of identity where people can explore impression management. Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reaction to their online presence offers valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course, because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.” (boyd, 2006)
    
    In both of these we are seeing aspects of the same phenomenon. To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
    
    Accordingly, what we know of the communities of the future where learning will actually occur is that they will be communities in which learners can immerse themselves and grow into something new. Previous experience suggests that these will be places where they can create and where they can project – not “serious games” but “modding communities”, not “reading groups” but “fan fiction”, not “educational simulations” but “LAN parties”.
    
• 25 Feb 09
  

  Herman Post

  future downes stephendownes learning technology education edtech connectivism

• 17 Feb 09
  

  Henry Paananen

  elearning web2.0 education blog e-learning web innovation research technology learning trends future online

• 14 Feb 09
  

  Jane Harris

  technology learning

  Downes Future of Online Learning

• 13 Feb 09
  

  Stephanie Affield

  learning technology education future trends e-learning

• 10 Feb 09
  

  Net Volution

  Education Technology

• 09 Feb 09
  

  Alex Hernandez

  e-learning elearning future distancelearning learning learningmanagement teaching cloud 2.0 web2.0 technology

  • • Wrapper interacts with learner information / context
    Add Sticky Note
  • In the world of digital content, too, the concept of 'fitting together' proved to be more complex that a mere plugging of one bit of content into another. It became clear that the learning management system would need to be able to exchange information with the learning object – to send to the object, for example, the student's name or grade, and to retrieve from the object, for example, test or quiz results. In the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) this was defined by means of what was called a 'wrapper' - some computer code that accompanied the object and facilitated this interaction. In practice, interactions tended to be specific to the system the learning object was defined for, so the objects, while technically SCORM-compliant, could not always be reused on other systems.
  • What we have seen of web technology as a whole suggests that this is the course that will be taken. A single metadata file – a Dublin Core resource description, for example – now links to external vocabularies, rights declarations, and other metadata. Moreover, metadata created through use, sometimes called attention metadata, is now being merged with bibliographic metadata. And global search sites, such as Google, use their own internally created contextual metadata (such as link information) to organize search results.

  1 more annotation...

• 04 Feb 09
  

  Lori Soule

  education elearning technology learning teaching web2.0 online future

• 02 Feb 09
  

  Diego Morelli
  • The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning.
  • access to bandwidth continues to improve
  • As a result of the use of multiple processors, computers themselves are becoming what might be called ‘platform neutral’. Computer programs are being designed to run in ‘virtual machines’ which can be carried from one hardware platform to another without adaptation.
  • Virtualization will occupy increasing attention in the future.
  • The combination of ubiquitous broadband and the portable operating system will result in the widespread popularity of what is currently being called ‘cloud computing’. The idea is that your computer, as a set of data files, is stored online. As such, it may be access from any hardware environment, including mobile or portable devices. Consequently a person will access their single computing environment from different devices while at home, on the road or in the office. This computer will, in turn, access data and applications provided by remote online services.
  • Storage is today widely available and relatively inexpensive.
  • Indeed, it is arguable that we have already reached the upper limit of the large single-system software environment. A report from Gartner Consulting, for example, suggests that Windows Vista is collapsing under its own weight.
  • Microsoft needs to virtualize Windows, to create versions tailored to different devices, simplifying the operating system providing a similar user experience across a wide range of products.

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• 28 Jan 09
  

  gsantipa

  pend

• 19 Jan 09
  

  Jim Julius

  distanceed elearning online future

• 11 Jan 09
  

  Rhona Polonsky

  technology trends future

• 10 Jan 09
  

  Jonathan Parkes

  education learning Downes connectivism e-learning

• 09 Jan 09
  

  Marc Boots-Ebenfield

  ple education change

• 

  Ruo Hai

  education pedagogy delicious

• 07 Jan 09
  

  Thomas Laigle

  Un excellent article de synthèse de Stephen Downes sur l'évolution de l'apprentissage en ligne et de ses tendances. En anglais...

  e-learning connectivisme environnement d'apprentissage tice éducation ingénierie pédagogique

  • from the point of view of most users, bandwidth is already unlimited, as they are able to share text, images and video with ease
  • Bandwidth is in the process of becoming ubiquitous, and though we may complain about the price, it is already, relatively speaking, cheap.

    • Situation in 3D world countries is not so good, but great improvements are awaited... cf Google's project to supply internet connection to Africa.
    Add Sticky Note
  • As a result of the use of multiple processors, computers themselves are becoming what might be called ‘platform neutral’. Computer programs are being designed to run in ‘virtual machines’ which can be carried from one hardware platform to another without adaptation.
  • As a result, it is not unreasonable to imagine people carrying their ‘computers’ around on ten (or hundred) gigabyte Flash memory drives.
  • The combination of ubiquitous broadband and the portable operating system will result in the widespread popularity of what is currently being called ‘cloud computing’. The idea is that your computer, as a set of data files, is stored online. As such, it may be access from any hardware environment, including mobile or portable devices. Consequently a person will access their single computing environment from different devices while at home, on the road or in the office. This computer will, in turn, access data and applications provided by remote online services.
  • Storage is today widely available and relatively inexpensive. Once almost inconceivable, terabyte hard drives are now available
  • The rise of Flash memory – now available at 32 gigabytes and counting – and the minidisc used in some MP3 players will greatly accelerate the trend we have already seen toward specialization we have seen in the last decade. Flash memory is solid state, which means it consumes much less power and is much more compact than disc-based storage.
  • Simple devices – from the One Laptop Per Child computer to the Asus Eee to the Nokia internet tablet to Apple’s iPhone now allow people to run complex software with very simple devices.
  • The distinction between ‘systems’ that characterized the Linux-Mac-Windows battles of the 90s and 2000s will fade into the background.
  • I said, the student of the future will not start up an operating system, internet browser, word processor and email program in order to start work on a course. The student will start up the course, which in turn will start up these applications on its own.
    
    The 2008 instantiation of this idea is the widget. A widget is a piece of code – typically written in Flash or Javascript – that resides on a desktop or web page and performs a specific function.
  • A widget obtains content from one website and displays it on another website. Often user interaction is provided – the user might type a term into a search widget, for example – and often some form of processing is requested at the remote website.
  • Widgets can be combined as a collection of services through web sites called ‘webtops’. These websites, such as PageFlakes and Netvibes, import content and services and arrange them on a page according to user settings and preferences.
  • It does not matter what operating system is used to view such pages because they are displayed inside the web browser
  • In particular, education is fundamentally a process of communication (learning, by contrast, is fundamentally a process of growth).
  • The PAD (Personal Access Device)
    
    In 1998 I wrote that ‘The PAD will become the dominant tool for online education, combining the function of book, notebook and pen.” The PAD, I said, would be “a lightweight notebook computer with touch screen functions and high speed wireless internet access.” I also said it would cost around three hundred dollars.
    
    By 2008, the prescience of that prediction has been proven.
  • With slim, lightweight technology, truly useful and portable PADs will be widely available within the next ten years.
  • In the future, it will be common to see these large-area displays hanging on living room and classroom walls. Instead of being the size of small windows, they will be the size of large blackboards.
  • The combination of portable and affordable computing devices, combined with widely available digital presentation tools, will make education genuinely personal and portable.
  • It is important to think not simply about how these technologies will operate individually but rather about how they will operate in combination. A person will move content online and offline with ease. Software and multimedia will no longer be associated with hardware or other devices but will rather be associated with individuals and will express their personal preferences. We are already seeing this as people can download and carry their own portable applications around with them.
  • Each person will have what may be thought of as a ‘profile’ of their own art, music and other media, which they have created themselves or with friends, along with records of their activities in various games and simulations

    • i.e. a personal learning (and playing, sharing, socializing...) environnement
    Add Sticky Note
  • The term ‘presentation software’ can be used to refer to applications designed to display learning material to students. (TechTarget, 2005) In the past, these learning materials were confined to physical media such as video tapes or CD-ROMS.
  • Learning materials are now available online as well. Probably the most representative (and most saturated) market is the language learning market, where providers market audio and video clips, flash cards and memory aids, study guides, and much more.

    • Although quality content is still scarce... most of these platforms focus on (sometimes useful) tools. User generated content doesn't work so good, probably because it takes time and high level skills to create language courses...
    Add Sticky Note
  • On the one hand, sophisticated tools have been placed into the hands of instructors and non-professionals to facilitate the creation of multimedia presentations. To name just a few, we could point PowerPoint, which allows instructors to create slides; to Audacity, which facilitates audio recording and editing, Adobe Premiere Elements, an inexpensive and accessible video editing tool; Camtasia, a screen-recording and video editing tool; and Second life, which enables people to create three-dimensional objects.
  • On the other hand, even more sophisticated tools have been placed into the hands of professional designers.
  • Thus there is, at any given time, a professional educational content community that creates high-end and custom educational content and a non-professional community that creates (relatively) low-end and more personalized educational content.
  • This concept, which in education became the idea of the ‘learning object’, emerged as a result of the idea that reusable software objects could be created.
  • Web 2.0 is actually a cluster of technologies that combine to allow web sites to become interactive.
  • Though there are different types of games, including quiz-games and branching games, the sort of games I felt most appropriate to educational use were learning environments such as were to be found in games like Sim City or Sim Earth. These games, now known as ‘spreadsheet games’, involve the creation of a large body of interacting data sets. Players manipulate both data sets and interactions, and resulting data states create the gameplay.

    • The best educational games for language learning are the games you can't play in your own language. But are kids willing to play to their favorite games in a foreign language if they don't have to ?
      Online (massive) multiplayer games can be nice too, although english is proeminent and written language often... well... specific.
    Add Sticky Note
  • The tools that we use today were in development in 1998 – multimedia or content engines such as PowerPoint or Director, development environments such as .Net, programming languages such as Java or Ruby, rendering systems such as VRML or SMIL. These now are disappearing into the background, while practitioners are working directly with content creation tools, both on the desktop and on the web.
  • In recent years educators have come more and more to believe that the presentation of educational content is but a small part of the learning process. To paraphrase the Cluetrain Manifesto, which came out roughly the same time as the Future of Online Learning, “all classrooms are conversations.”
  • Synchronous Conferencing
  • As I noted in 1998, people will want a system that transfers data as well as video signals. These applications do that, providing audio and video communication while also allowing application and desktop sharing, whiteboards and notes, polling, text messaging, and more.
  • While the systems typically used in an educational environment are commercial applications involving some cost, similar applications are rapidly becoming available for free to the average user.
  • Skype provides free audio communication (and as of 2006, free video communication) to users around the world. (Skype, 2005) Moreover, open source conferencing suites, such as Dim Dim and WiZiQ, are emulating the function of commercial applications.
  • Asynchronous Conferencing
    
  • Two major trends have characterized the last ten years of asynchronous conferencing.
    
    First, as was easy to predict in 1998, the dominance of text-based content has given way to a much wider range of formats. Audio content became popular with file sharing and music content services, as well as with the rise of podcasting in 2003. Video content became widely available following the development of Flash video services and of sites like YouTube, which allowed users to upload and convert their videos.
  • Early web conferencing systems followed the same format, taking the form of threaded conversations on web bulletin boards. This system was followed in just a few years by blogging. Messages were sorted chronologically by author, instead of by subject, and each person managed his or her own blog. Groups of people, meanwhile, congregated on content management systems such as Drupal or Plone. But as people drifted back to centralized sites, and as linking to other people became more important, sites that support social networks rose to prominence and people began to spend less time on places like Blogger and LiveJournal and more time on places like MySpace and Facebook.
  • that once content standards have been widely adopted for some type of medium, content expressed in that medium has become commoditized (that is to say, widely available at prices that approximate zero).
  • Efforts to monetize content have, in turn, typically involved the creation of proprietary content formats.
  • We now have powerful and inexpensive computers we can sling over our shoulder or carry in our shirt pocket. (Yamamoto, 2006) These computers are connected wirelessly to the internet at bandwidths sufficient to allow instant multimedia communication anywhere on the planet. These computers will only improve in the years ahead, becoming faster, slimmer, and more affordable.
  • In the end, the standards win, because, in the end, the people win. Societies – or groups, or communities – that sustain effective communication are more robust than societies that control it. There is a significant loss of efficiency in environments of closed, controlled communication. Thus, although artificial constraints will continue to be used maintain proprietary communications formats, the standards will win out.
  • To date, much of our attention, even in the field of online learning, has been focused on a system of learning centered on the class or cohort: groups of students studying the same curriculum pace through the same set of learning activities. (Fenning, 2004) We continue to organize classes in grades, sorted, especially in the earlier years, by age. Time continues to be the dominant metaphor for units of learning, and learning continues to be constrained by time.
  • While we want to provide personalized attention, especially to submitted work, testing and grading, learning is still heavily dependent on the teacher. But because the teacher in turn is responsible for assembling, and often presenting, the materials to be learned, customization and personalization have not been practical. So we have adopted a model where small groups of people form a cohort, thus allowing the teacher to present the same material to more than one person at a time, while offering individualized interaction and assessment.
  • What we have begun to notice with online learning, however, is a decreasing emphasis on this formal style of learning, and an increasing emphasis on what has come to be called informal learning. (Chivers, 2006) In the case of informal learning, students are not constrained by the limits of the classroom model. They can set their own curriculum and proceed at their own pace. (Moore, 1986) Learning can thus be based on a student’s individual needs, rather than as predefined in a formal class, and based on a student’s schedule, rather than that set by the institution.
  • Traditionally, people have been seen to learn either as individuals or in groups. This characterization of organization is not unique to education; it is very common to talk of (say) the needs of the individual versus the needs of the state. This characterization, however, glosses over the possibility that there may be more or less cohesive ways of organizing people, thus allowing for a middle point between the individual and the group: the network.
  • Though networks have always existed, modern communications technologies highlight their existence and given them a new robustness. Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.
  • Classes are closed; there is a clear barrier between members and non-members.
  • In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser. People pursue their own objectives in their own way, while at the same time initiating and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with others pursuing similar objectives. Learning and discussion is not structured, but rather, is determined by the needs and interests of the participants. There is no leader; each person participates as they deem appropriate. There are no boundaries; people drift into and out of the conversation as their knowledge and interests change.
  • the LMS was not based on personalized learning, but rather, preserved the course management structure that prevailed in schools and universities.
  • Personal Learning Environments
    
    In the future, competences will be just one way (and an unusually employer-centered way) to select learning opportunities. What we will see, rather, is that the selection of learning opportunities will not be a stand-alone activity, but instead will be embedded in other activities.
  • The PLE is not an application, but rather, a description of the process of learning in situ from a variety of courses and according to one’s personal, context-situated, needs. The process, simply, is that learners will be presented with learning resources according to their interests, aptitudes, educational levels, and other factors (including employer factor and social factors) while they are in the process of working at their job, engaging in a hobby, or playing a game.
  • The environment that they happen to be in, whether it be a productivity tool, hobbyist web page, or online game, constitutes (at that time) the personal learning environment. Resources from across the internet are accessed from that environment: resources that conform to the student’s needs and interests, that have been in some way pre-selected or favorably filtered, and that may have been created by production studios, teachers, other students, or the student him or herself. Content – interaction, media, data – flows back and forth between the learning environment and the external resources, held together by the single identity being employed by the learner in this context.
  • In time, the learning management systems deployed by educational institutions will evolve into educational delivery systems usable by personal learning environments. They will, in essence, be the ‘remote resource’ accessed from a given context. Educational delivery systems will recognize the identity of the student making the request and will coordinate with other online applications (which may include commercial brokers, open resource repositories, or additional student records) to facilitate the student’s learning activity.

    • educational delivery systems = a filtering/connecting hub between student and resources/people ?
    Add Sticky Note
  • We might think that these educational delivery systems will be delivering learning objects. This is not entirely incorrect, although a learning object today has come to be seen as more like a unit of text in a textbook or a lesson in a programmed learning workbook. It will be more accurate in the future to say ‘learning resource’, since many such resources will be available that do not conform to the traditional picture of a learning object – and may be as simply as a single image, or as complex as a simulation or training module.
  • The personal learning environment, however, is not based on the principle of access to resources. It should more accurately be viewed as a mechanism to interact with multiple services. (Milligan, 2006) The personal learning environment is more of a conferencing tool than it is a content tool. The focus of a personal learning environment is more on creation and communication than it is consumption and completion. It is best to think of the interfaces facilitated by a personal learning environment as ways to create and manipulate content, as applications rather than resources.
  • In particular, that the various channels created by the PLE enable is for a student to form a set of connections with a collection of individuals at any given point
  • This idea is reflected today in the concept of the e-portfolio, where the products created through the process of engagement and interaction are stored and (digitally) mounted for display. We see today the idea of an e-portfolio taking hold outside traditional learning – people have their own blogs, their own Flickr photo portfolios, art projects on Deviant Art, game modifications, fan fiction, open source software, and much more.
  • The educational institution is unlikely to disappear, but it is unlikely also to remain the sole locus of student learning. Educational institutions will need more and more to think of themselves as part of a larger system, and as their offerings as entities that will become a part of, and interact with, the larger environment.
  • connectivism. (Siemens, 2004) The theory proposes that knowledge is contained, not merely in the bits of information transmitted to and fro as content and creations, but in the way these contents, and the people that create them, link together.
  • The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment
  • 
    As discussed above, educational institutions will need to see themselves as providers of learning resources (and not merely learning objects). These resources will be online services that connect students with: learning content; games, simulations, and other activities; ad hoc communities of learners; and experts and other practitioners. They will be specialized multimedia content consumption, editing and authoring systems designed to facilitate a student’s ability to perceive and perform as modeled by experts in a community of practice.
  • Today, institutions do not yet know how to deliver information to other systems.
  • However, institutions are beginning to learn to prepare content for distribution through remote systems, such as the provision of lectures for delivery through iTunes University. Such systems will evolve over time into a mature system of open content distribution, facilitated through open access mandates, repository and other server software, and content and interaction standards.
  • Today, as noted above, we tend to think of such resources as static and bibliographical, like books in a library, where contents are ‘published’ and then ‘stored’. This view is evident in much of the discussion that surrounds learning technology today. We think of work as being stored in a research repository, indexed and archived, in such a way that we can search for them, typically through a catalogue (or metadata) system, and retrieve them. (Barker, 2007) The major concerns of educators in this environment are things like persistence and provenance, copyright and reproduction. (Jantz & Giarlo, 2005)
  • In the networked learning environment, however, learning resources are best thought of not as content objects about a discipline that are retrieved and studied, but rather as words in a multimedia vocabulary that is used by students and teachers in an ongoing conversation within a discipline to engage in projects and activities. (Downes, The New Literacy, 2002) Content and learning resources, rather than being thought of as static objects, ought to be thought of as a dynamic flow. They are more like water or electricity and they are like books and artifacts.
    The technology of learning – and of the web generally – is evolving to accommodate flow.
  • Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.
    
    RSS and related specifications will be one of the primary ways Personal Learning Environments connect with remote systems. To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet.
  • When people think of personalized online learning, they frequently think of adaptive systems, learning programs powered by artificial intelligences that test a student’s competence, formulate customized lesson plans based on those pre-tests, and then measure a student’s performance though a series of online activities. (Boticario & Santos, 2007)
    
    While people will no doubt pursue solo learning activities (just as they, by themselves, read books today) this will not constitute the core of the learning experience in the future (just as reading books does not constitute the core of learning today).
    
  • In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)These will include not only the results from games and other competitions with other people and with simulators, but also their creative work, their multimedia projects, their interactions with other people in ongoing or ad hoc projects, and the myriad details we consider when we consider whether or not a person is well educated.
    Though there will continue to be ‘degrees’, these will be based on a mechanism of evaluation and recognition, rather than a lockstep marching through a prepared curriculum. And educational institutions will not have a monopoly on such evaluations (though the more prestigious ones will recognize the value of aggregating and assessing evaluations from other sources).
  • Earning a degree will, in such a world, resemble less a series of tests and hurdles, and will come to resemble more a process of making a name for oneself in a community. The recommendation of one person by another as a peer will, in the end, become the standard of educational value, not the grade or degree.
  • but online learning is at heart a form of distance learning, and therefore offers as one of its primary advantages a form of time and place independence for the learner. Cloud computing and mobile computing will offer these forms of independence. They can, indeed, be thought of as offering a third, equally important, form of independence: device independence.
  • Time Independence
    
    We are well used to the idea that students, whether working in traditional online courses or independently through informal learning, will access their materials and activities at any time of the day. They can work any day of the week, or if they are employed in agriculture or some other seasonal occupation, any time of the year.
  • Place Independence
    
    Online learning stiff suffers from the misperception that it is about having students sit in front of their computer screen for extended periods of time. As a consequence, the idea that online learning might foster independence of place has been missing in much of the discussion of the field.
  • That said, much of the learning that is happening in today’s schools is beginning to resemble the sort of learning that one might expect in a connected environment. Student-centered methodologies are becoming widely accepted in many nations. In particular, constructivist pedagogies are being implemented in some e-learning technology, such as Moodle, and adopted by some systems, such as in the province of Quebec, Canada.
  • The convergence of digital life with in-person life is not, therefore, a mere addition of a digital dimension to the in-person life we lead today. It transforms and reshapes that life, removing from it elements that could be done more efficiently (or more pleasantly) in a digital environment, and opening up opportunities for new and more types of in-person activities.
  • Learning Communities
    
    Education is not merely the acquisition of new information and skills. To become educated in a discipline is to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline. Consequently, learning is a social activity, wherein we immerse ourselves into what Etienne Wenger called a community of practice, learn what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, and be able to complete, as Thomas Kuhn famously summarized, the problems at the end of the chapter.
    
  • Interest-Based Communities
    
    Today we would use the label ‘communities of practice’ to label ‘interest-based communities’, or as I also called them, ‘topic-based communities’.
  • Wenger’s characterization was informative. Communities would form around a topic of interest – the ‘domain’. They would engage in community activities – “members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information.” And they would share a practice – a repertoire of resources, a vocabulary, common stories, common methodologies, common ways of approaching a problem.
    
    Learning in the community of practice takes the form of what might be called ‘peer-to-peer professional development activities’. Rather than formalized learning, members help each other directly.
  • peer-based communities are almost the polar opposite of interest-based communities. They are not based on some common interest; one member may be an artist while the other may be a scientist. In the first instance, they are created through proximity, being composed of people who live in the same neighborhood or who go to the same school. Over the longer term, we may say, they are just people who meet by happenstance, and find an affinity for each other.
  • Given convergence, it was inevitable that these communities would also establish themselves online. Indeed, the secret to the rise of Facebook, which rose to prominence in a short time, and which now has the most traffic of any site on the internet, is that it formed connections between friends based on their common origins and common schools
  • It is probably a truism today (though there still remain exceptions to be observed online) that communities are grown rather than constructed, and that (therefore) they are owned (and managed) by their members rather than by some external agency. The desire for autonomy comes part and parcel with some of the perceived benefits of learning and growing in a community: safely, security, and privacy.
  • The value of a community, however, and especially of a learning community, comes from the diversity in the community. Students gather around an instructor precisely because the instructor has knowledge, beliefs and opinions that the students don’t share. They gather around each other because they each have unique experiences. Fistering a learning community is as much a matter of drawing on the differences as it is a matter of underlining the similarities.
  • What will work best online, therefore, will not be a process of community building, but rather, a process of community enabling. The transition in community is therefore analogous, and parallel, to the transition in content. Just as people no longer need publishers to create content for them, they no longer need organizers to create community. Rather, just as, with access to powerful content-creation tools, they can create their own content, in the same way, with powerful community-building tools, they can create their own communities.
  • Learners will create their own communities, their own environments. At most, the educator needs to ensure that the tools are there for students to use, and that the channels of communication, from student to student, from community to community, are open.
  • To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
  • The Triad
    
    The idea of the triad model is that in any given learning situation, there are three major participants: the student, the instructor, and a local coach or facilitator. The idea was that the instructor would be online, a member of the interest-based learning community, while the coach or facilitator would be more a member of the peer-based community.
  • The Divergence of Learning and Testing
    
    It hasn’t happened yet in any large scale and formal way, but it is probably inevitable that the domains of ‘learning’ and ‘testing’ will separate. In the future it may even be thought of as quaint that those responsible for the fostering of learning were also those responsible for evaluating whether or not learning actually happened.
  • n traditional learning there is slow acceptance that people may be tested without first having been taught. Colleges and universities are investigating ‘PLAR’ (Prior Learning And Recognition) systems. People who are in some way able to demonstrate their ability – through a portfolio system, for example, are able to circumvent the need for testing altogether.
  • Modularity
    
    A History of Modularity
    
    When the concept of the 'learning object' was proposed, a large part of the idea was based on the idea that these small chunks of content would be fitted together to form larger entities. "Like Legos," said some proponents, describing the way the objects would use a universal interface to fir together.
  • As David Wiley noted after a few years of practice with learning objects, other analogies might be more appropriate - that of the atom, for example, where some parts may fit some other parts, but not all parts fit all other parts.
    
    In the years that have passed, specifications, such as Content Packaging and Simple Sequencing, were designed to facilitate the creation of larger entities out of smaller entities. But the idea of making large content entities out of smaller and reusable content entities began to be challenged. In 'the reusability paradox', Wiley questioned the idea. For content to be usable, he argued, it must be very specific to a context. But if context is very specific to a context, it is not reusable.
    
    It is too early to suggest that the idea of reusable modular content is incorrect, if indeed it ever was incorrect. But Wiley's observations, along with a deeper look at the analogy from mechanical parts, shows that reuse is rather more complex than the mere connection of digital objects together.
  • Meanwhile, more or less public archives sprang up on the open internet, sites such as the internet Archive, Flickr, YouTube and box.net.
    
    The educational community, however, saw the repository as something that would be housed and managed locally.
  • Proponents of this model argued that local storage was necessary to ensure reliable access, consistency and persistence.
    
    This is an argument that makes sense when reusable content is being used to construct static and asynchronous courses. As the use of learning resources becomes more dynamic, however, the extra steps required in order to obtain and store locally external content become more onerous. In the long run, a mixture of approaches will be used. Material will be sourced externally – it won’t make any sense to restrict one’s search to a local library – and insofar as local copies are created, this will be done automatically.
  • As I later argued in my paper Resource Profiles, LOM should not attempt to be all things to all people, and should focus solely on the educational properties of a resource. Moreover, I argued, these educational properties are not identifiable a priori in the resource itself, but rather, are defined over time through use. Consequently, instead of designing LOM as though it were a bibliographic record – which was the practice of the educational technology community – LOM should be integrated with and used with other specifications and standards, forming part of a larger, and more dynamic, resource profile.
  • What we have seen of web technology as a whole suggests that this is the course that will be taken. A single metadata file – a Dublin Core resource description, for example – now links to external vocabularies, rights declarations, and other metadata. Moreover, metadata created through use, sometimes called attention metadata, is now being merged with bibliographic metadata. And global search sites, such as Google, use their own internally created contextual metadata (such as link information) to organize search results.
  • While the traditional conception of learning objects was that designers or instructors would assemble smaller chunks of content into coherent presentations of learning material, this is rather the idea that the management of re-use would be placed directly into the learner’s hands, so that reuse could occur, not simply within a course content, but in any context where re-use makes sense.
    
    In this way, the reuse of learning resources is consistent with the sort of reuse we see happening elsewhere on the internet. Rather than being structured to form larger wholes, individual bits of content are being remixed and repurposed to form new content objects, and these content objects are being used in what amounts to a rich multi-media based conversation. From the perspective of the learner, the learning resource is like a YouTube video or a Flickr image or any other type of content: something to be shared with friends and used to express ideas and points of view.
    
    None of the metaphors, such as Legos or atoms, describe this version of modularity appropriately. I once used the metaphor of objects in an environment – like a horse and a palm tree – to describe modularity. Objects are not designed for each other, nor do they fit together in any particular way – they coexist in the same space, and each perceives the other in its own way. They share, if you will, the same information space – the palm tree reflects light waves, and the horse sees them. The objects function autonomously, connected, interacting, but not joined.
  • publishers sought greater control over distribution, seeking to license, rather than sell, content and software.
    
    This prevented instructors from replicating online practices common in the typical classroom. No longer could newspaper clippings, articles or textbook chapters be distributed as handouts. No longer could video clips be shown or audio recordings be played to the class. The digitization of academic content was, at every turn, challenged by publishers.
    
    In like manner, the use of educational software became a complex and expensive proposition for educational institutions. The cost of educational software rose, mergers and lawsuits limited competition, and customers were locked in to existing vendors by proprietary technology and the cost of conversion.
  • The argument in favour of strong intellectual property protection is that it fosters innovation. But our experiences over the last ten years show the paucity of such claims. The areas in which innovation has been fastest have been areas in which no effective patents held sway – HTML, CSS and Javascript, content management and syndication.
  • While court cases, protests and defiance have garnered the headlines, the most overwhelmingly popular response to proprietary content and technology has been the fostering and creation of free and open alternatives.
    
    Free and open source software, as well as free and open content, have both been made possible through the development of licenses prohibiting the enclosure of such work in proprietary media. These licenses have been defended successfully in court.
  • A growing tide of opinion has begun to support the Open Access movement, driven largely by the argument that scientific research and educational content produced through government investments ought to be freely available.
    
  • Even if commercial publishers win strong copy protections from policy makers and technology companies, the trend toward free and open content will overwhelm them. As it stands, content producers are beginning to understand that it is better to allow their content to circulate freely, without restriction. This is because such content offers unequaled marketing and promotional opportunities, especially for new and not well recognized acts. Additionally, content syndication agencies, such as YouTube, are finding ways to recognize commercial content and allocate advertising revenue to the owners.
  • What should be understood, however, is that the bulk of educational content online will be free to access and reuse. It will be created by governments, foundations, companies and individuals, and will be permitted to freely circulate, used by students and instructors worldwide to support their own learning.
  • As with the market in open source software (and perhaps even more so) the commercial presence will be seen most of all through the provision of services. There are two major criteria for any educational good to obtain financial return in the marketplace: first, it cannot be something that can be digitally duplicated, for then the effective value per unit approaches zero; and second, it cannot be something that the users of that good or service could easily produce for themselves, for once again, the effective value per unit approaches zero.
  • Today, much of the value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity – a scarcity of seats in classrooms, a scarcity of credentialing agencies, and a scarcity of educational publications, for example. These scarcities will disappear as governments prefer to fund education directly, and at cost, rather than support such business models.
  • But in general, educational enterprises will have to be more creative in finding opportunities. Content providers will discover there are much larger markets to be had when they help people create their own content. This will be the basis for the educational marketplace of the future. In general, helping people provide for themselves – helping them, in other words, save time and money – will provide the best opportunities. Selling people cameras instead of pictures, for example. Course content creation kits instead of courses.
  • the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.
    
    As a result, rather than the employment of a single system to accomplish all educational tasks, both instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each other. These tools, as described above, will communicate with each other, and will support the acquisition and creation of learning content, as well as activities such as games or real-time collaboration.
    
  • In a sense, the platform of the future will do exactly the job assigned to the instructional management system of the past: “an instructional management system is the backbone motherboard into which all educational components are plugged.” This analogy remains apt today. However, with a proliferation of platforms, a central question emerges: who manages the platform?
  • Tracking and reporting are the major functions required of a learning management system today (and main reasons institutions want to keep using them). No matter what device a student is using, no matter where they access an online course, the LMS can report on what they have viewed (and reviewed), keep track of test scores and upload grades, and provide a secure, monitored location for in-class conversation and collaboration.
    
    Future learning technology will need to support such functions, at least to some degree. The recognition of learning, whether by institutional certification, third-part testing, or community reputation, is to a significant degree a matter of reporting activities and achievement.
  • The popularity of social networks in recent years is only partially due to the desire to connect with others; it is also driven by a desire to shut out unwanted people and content.
  • As people become increasingly frustrated with unwanted content, the internet will resemble less a broadcast medium and more a person-to-person communications medium.
  • The two schools of thought identified in my earlier paper can still be seen today. On the one hand, there is a body of opinion that states that online learning is more expensive than traditional learning, that the average online course costs thousands of dollars to produce, and that specialized systems, such as simulations, even more so. And there is the other voice that points to the economics of reuse and suggests that online learning, in the long run, will save money.
  • Where online learning involves the development of courses, simulations, and other advanced software, development costs are very high.
  • On the other hand, if the work done to develop an online course serves merely to duplicate an in-person course already available to students, the expense seems questionable. Replicating classroom conditions is not the cheapest way to conduct learning online, and we become more experienced with the internet, alternatives emerge. A model of learning that puts much of the organization into the hand of students – such as is the case with the Massive Open Online Course being taught by George Siemens and myself – may prove to be much more cost-efficient.
  • Automation does not mean the end of teaching careers, though. What automation allows is (as I said ten years ago) a ‘deep personalization’ of learning. Automation allows us to more easily create and present content, to more easily form groups and collaborate, to more easily give tests and take surveys.

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• 06 Jan 09
  

  Dave Holden

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  Mike Wesch

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  jordiserrano

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  learning stephendownes education technology research teaching trends stephen_downes ecu_clt_2009

• 31 Dec 08
  

  Jordi Prats

  web2.0 e-learning for:pep.torn for:jserranom for:jordiserrano for:jserrano

• 30 Dec 08
  

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• 29 Dec 08
  

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  Blog Stephen_Downes

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• 23 Dec 08
  

  Donna Baumbach

  technology web2.0 trends future elearnng delicious_backup

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  hz09

• 21 Dec 08
  

  EdTech RoundUp

  The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On
  
  An MS-Word version of this essay is available at http://www.downes.ca/files/future2008.doc
  
  In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.

  future technology learning education Downes trends connectivism e-learning ETRweekly10

• 20 Dec 08
  

  Paulis Cheung

  elearning stephen downes connectivism Educational_Technology

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  Peter Beaumont

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• 15 Dec 08
  

  dwenmoth

  Stephen Downes on the future of online learning

  web2.0 pedagogy research trends

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
  Situation in 3D world countries is not so good, but great improvements are awaited... cf Google's project to supply internet connection to Africa.
• 
  Drew McAllister on 2009-08-24
  so, part of the adoption process may be that the introduction of a tool must be preceded by a discussion of pedagogy and what the tool can bring to that discussion
• 
  Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
  i.e. a personal learning (and playing, sharing, socializing...) environnement
• 
  Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
  Although quality content is still scarce... most of these platforms focus on (sometimes useful) tools. User generated content doesn't work so good, probably because it takes time and high level skills to create language courses...
• 
  Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
  The best educational games for language learning are the games you can't play in your own language. But are kids willing to play to their favorite games in a foreign language if they don't have to ?
  Online (massive) multiplayer games can be nice too, although english is proeminent and written language often... well... specific.
• 
  lindaneffster on 2010-02-03
  Instructional design methodologies rely on outcomes based learning to the detriment of the students -- not all skills can be measured through an outcomes based process.
• 
  Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-09
  educational delivery systems = a filtering/connecting hub between student and resources/people ?
• 
  Alex Hernandez on 2009-02-09
  Wrapper interacts with learner information / context

Page Comments

• 
  Peter Johansson on 2008-11-19
  Long text. Looking forward to read it
• 
  Will Stewart on 2008-11-21
  A useful summary of where we are at now and how we got here.

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